I thought he’d gone to his dad. The next day he’d still be pissed, but everything would turn out fine in the end. My happiness fused with the happiness of the village, and even though it did a shabby job of papering over the gruesome horror that had us in its grip, that night I loved every drunk who staggered by, I loved them all, maybe even Mladen. I wondered whether maybe I’d gotten it all wrong. Dejan Kunčec’s dad drove me home, and Dejan and I burped in the back seat and giggled. That night Bacawk and Chickichee weren’t around, and I fell asleep without fear. I knew I wouldn’t remember my dreams in the morning.
12.
The next day I heard that my only friend had been floating in the cold river while I slept. The teacher came into the classroom, deeply shaken, and sighed. She blew her nose in her handkerchief and—halting after every sentence and staring into space as if she were reading to us from an invisible newspaper—said, “A child from our school drowned last night in the Mura. Franjo Klanz from class 4A. He was found by fishermen a few miles downstream. Near Mursko Središće. Now everybody, come with me.”
At first I was calm. I was certain this wasn’t true. In the crush of us leaving the classroom, Goran said, “Dolenčec told him to go kill himself yesterday at the soccer field.” They lined us up in the cafeteria, and the principal was already there with his hands crossed and a law enforcement officer beside him. They asked if anybody knew anything about Franz. Somebody in the front row said that Franz had been at the soccer field, they’d seen him playing soccer, and then he played hide-and-go-seek with some other kids, and then he went home. A few others agreed, and nobody seemed bothered that it was a total lie. They felt better not remembering him as someone they didn’t want around. I knew they all thought I’d sent him to his death, but I was sure he would walk in any moment, alive and well.
I felt a catch in my chest at the thought that maybe he’d run away and wouldn’t come back. And then, even though I hadn’t killed him, everybody would finally find out what I’d been hiding for so long inside me.
I crept out of school holding my bag and slippers, utterly shattered. The only thought that kept me going was that Franz would show up any minute now, that the body they’d found couldn’t be his. A few people had gathered in front of the store: Pišta, the reporter from the Međimurje, Rumenige, Samanta, and some others. They were talking quietly, privately, and I slowed, hoping to hear what they were saying. Someone pointed at me, and they all turned. They didn’t try to hide their stares. I stopped, ready to stare back at them forever, till I’d withstood all that they had to say about me. I wasn’t alone. To my left was Bacawk, to my right, Chickichee.
Bacawk whispered, while I was standing like that, frozen, that Franz had gone from the soccer field to the river, that he was very sad. He stared into the dark water and saw our world mirrored without Znarf in it. That world was a good world, and that’s why he went to take his place there. Not forever, just for a while. Just to rest his eyes for a moment.
“The boy wanted to be in a place where no one could see him. That’s all he wanted. A place where no one could touch him.”
He wanted to stretch out his hand, to touch, maybe for a moment, what was on the other side, and then he’d come back.
“Maybe the boy will return. You might have to wait a long time,” finished Bacawk. I realized then that the two of them had been waiting for centuries for someone who would never come back.
“Look at how they’re watching you,” said Chickichee. “Like you murdered somebody. Like they’re better than you. And believe you me, they ain’t. They don’t understand those who were here before them.”
His voice faded into the distance with every step I took toward the silent group. The silence was broken only by a distant, low hum, which, when the wind picked up, became a rumbling, deep vibration.
“Don’t go there!” hollered Bacawk.
My only thought was to endure my punishment and then vanish into oblivion.
“They want this to be your fault, but it ain’t your fault that we’re all cursed. There’ll be no peace here till the end of the world, till fire blazes from the heavens and consumes everything, and the wind blows away all the ashes. That’s what they used to tell us in the olden days,” said Bacawk.
I stopped. So it was true. From the dark forests, a curse had been cast upon the village. And the curse did have to do with the murdered will-o’-the-wisp folk. But, Bacawk told me, the will-o’-the-wisp folk were not the cruel ogres from the north who’d ventured out of the forest and killed the good people of the village. They were peaceful, they’d been living in the forests since time immemorial, they’d been making colorful pots and worshipping forest gods in the likeness of animals. The ogres galloped in from the east on their horses, and when they came to the forests by the riverbank, they found a long-forgotten settlement, abandoned by a tall people who wore woolen tunics and metal armor. The ogres raised their camp near the riverbank. The forest dwellers taught the newcomers how to use floating two-boat mills. The ogres had only known mills run by beasts of burden. Close at hand was a trough for kneading clay, so they taught the ogres how to make bricks, durable housing, and kilns. They taught them to make candles, as the ogres had only known how to make torches. But the ogres were full of hatred. They fought out of habit. They despised all those who worshipped other gods and spoke other languages. Most of all, they hated the lights visible at night from the forest where the Candle Bearers dwelled, because they thought these came from invisible creatures inside the wax. The ogres barged into the homes and sacred places of the Candle Bearers. They stole and destroyed. They beat and tormented. And in the end they killed most all of them. First the livestock, then the women and children, in front of the men they’d lined up at the edge of the forest. And finally they chopped off the men’s heads.
The rumbling grew louder with each step as I moved toward the villagers, and each of Bacawk’s words helped me see who they truly were.
A pile of corpses was buried in a big pit in the forest, and others were tossed into the river. It was the ogres who stayed. The children of the ogres’ children embraced the belief in one God whose son had come down to Earth and taken all sins upon Himself. They atoned, repented, and were forgiven by God and their new ruler. And in return they were told that God had given them, and only them, that very land, with the mills on the river and the fertile black soil. And they were told that God made them good. They were made to believe that they had gone to battle for God against the evil forest dwellers. That the demons of their ogre ancestors could be reined in for perpetuity if they did as they were told. The bloodthirsty ogres threw the Candle Bearers’ effigies to their pagan deities from the highest bluffs into the river, where they sleep to this day somewhere on the silty river bottom and summon those who survived. And the submerged church, and the monstrous people… all this was their legacy of blood, their legacy of violence. Papered over by a pathetic hope about boundless goodness. Bacawk took a deep breath.